Road Safety: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-09-30 ============================================================ Gareth Scahill (FG), Nominated by the Taoiseach I welcome the Minister of State for this debate on an important topic. I will follow on from what Senator O'Reilly raised. We are able to get money for big schemes, but sometimes the ones that will have a bigger impact and a wider geographical spread are the ones that suffer. As I have raised before, we have spent in excess of €50 million on the safe routes to school scheme, but 50% of the schools that originally applied to that scheme still have to get the work done. Yet, schools are on busy main roads and, predominantly, there are no speed reduction measures outside them. I noticed recently Kingsland National School had a safety improvement work scheme introduced, which will give periodic speed limit reductions at various times of the day. However, what we need outside schools are speed bumps. They are not cost-intensive measures. The safe routes to school scheme is all the bells and whistles. The speed bumps will have the impact, especially when there is no enforcement outside schools. If people hit a speed bump once, they will not do so a second or third time. They would have a lasting impact on the safety of the children going to a lot of these schools. I recognise Councillors Ruth Conboy and Valerie Duffy who have done surveys in the schools in Roscommon and listened to parents about the needs they identify. Rather than just getting names from parents and asking who wants to see changes, they are listening and looking for the issues parents identify outside schools. It would be remiss of me not to mention the tragic incident that happened in Kiltybo between Ballyhaunis and Ballinlough earlier in September, where Eoin Doyle lost his life at a level crossing going home from football training with his father one evening. That is not directly the Minister of State's area, but we need to reduce the reliance on road users having to judge whether a train is coming at these junctions. We need to accelerate the installation of detection and early warning systems. I must also mention the N60 safety scheme, which the CEO and director of services of Roscommon County Council have committed to. It needs to go into the road safety strategy, so I ask the Minister of State to have a word with the relevant Minister. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-09-30/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:00:59+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-09-30